A man without limits is not without wanting

Vidal is alternately over rated and under rated as a novelist, but it is his genius as an essayist that will cement his reputation in place. Literature, politics, films, theater, social custom--his was the work of the true public intellectual, considering trends, ideas , schemes that effect the social body.It's easy to think Vidal likes a certain amount of humanity in his scouring of the culture , but I think that might be one of his blessings. 

He does not, over all, pad his essays about literature, film or other cultural phenomenon with an expected Liberal Arts tic of insisting that what he's inspecting is an advancement . Instead of rose colored glasses, he prefers coated in Crisco. On politics I think he is rather bloodless and elevated in his No pronouncements--at some point it seems he felt he had to out do WF Buckley for patrician airs, but from the Left. 

It's essays on literature I find rewarding over and over and over again as I go to him for judgments from a man who is well read and who regards the writing of fiction to be something of a sacred trust , owing to art but finally meant to present readerships with complicated tales of complicated, comic, tragic characters in hairy times , folks whose tales help readerships experience something new and provoke to think outside their comfort zones. He was cranky in this regard, and its here I find a fiery advocate for the well written novel.

His prose style is perfect for his essays, especially his literary cave diving, but his fiction wordage is High Competence . Not horrible, not awkward, occasionally evocative, but rather flat so far as euphony is concerned. He is a good novelist, not a great one, a professional writer who, though not a genius, has written some masterpieces . I would say Burr, 1876 and Lincoln are in that arena. He wrote things, many things, that are just exercises, novels he wrote as though to win a bet. I have always found his satire to be mean, smug and fatally unfunny.

The train keeps a rolling

Sad, but remember that the talented and insightful Anthony Bourdain was a bad heroin addict before he got clean and began to write books. He continued to drink, alcoholically according to some who knew him, which makes sense. If one is addicted to one drug, they are addicted to them all, and abstinence and a good support system are the best ways to learn to live a fulfilling life without depressives of any kind. I suspect the alcohol-fueled his depression. I have, incidentally, nearly 31 years of sobriety and "clean time" and have yet to see a junkie who kicked dope and then go on to drink successfully. There were two results of those who drank after quitting dope. They either sobered up entirely or died too soon. I feel the loss --he was a fine man. But I suspect his lot would have been better had he not continued to drink so copiously.
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The Doors were a mixed bag for me; the first two albums are among the most important rock albums of all time, with the remainder alternating between the proverbial poles of brilliance and balderdash. As a band, they were simply sublime and unique, with the odd combination of blues, flamenco, classical, jazz, Artaud, and epic theater being crafted in their hands to create a sound and feel that was singular and instantly identifiable. As a vocalist, Jim Morrison was often as evocative as the greatest fans proclaim, and it fit the half-awake twilight that seemed to be his constant state of consciousness. As a poet, though, I thought he was simply awful, fragmented, crypto-mystic surrealism that, save for some striking and memorable lines, collapsed from its flimsy elisions and obtuse vagaries. In his posthumous collections, the pieces read too often, like the notebook jottings of an introspective 17-year-old. I say that as an introspective 17 year and is now an introspective 65-year-old. Morrison might have become the poet he wanted to be had he written, edited, and finesse his work as he desired when he left for Paris. I will say, though, that being the vocalist in the Doors allowed him to go through his writings, his poems and select many of the stronger passages for the band's more theatrical songs. Ironically, the Doors seemed to be an institutional editor for Morrison's words, forcing the bard to decide which of his jottings was actually the most powerful, concise, emphatic. In all, a fine and well-researched piece, Jon, another fine piece of historical journalism.

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The Yardbirds and Aerosmith effectively took this song behind the garage and reupholstered it until it was nothing but a bulldozing pain to rape mentality. Tiny Bradshaw's original reminds us of something more sensual, fun, swinging because we have an analogy of dance partners working here, not combatants.

two paragraps

1.The American was the first Henry James novel I read, and it's a great one, about a nouveau riche American named Christopher Newman who, on his first visit to Europe, rather naively seeks respite from the vulgarities of his native country, only to learn of the great and gross things about Europe in the course of his search. One of the first writers to deal with the American experience in the Old World, and a relevant one it remains. And I love the slippery syntax of James' prose. American business , arrogant and smug in its focus on pragmatic efficiency, meets the Old World, which hangs on to tradition , custom and class in the face of rapidly encroaching Internationalist modernism.  

    

2. I've been harsh on Ezra Pound's poetry since my first full exposure to his work in college; as a lyricist I thought he was grandiose without rhythm, diffuse without those pockets of lyric genius that make critical interpretation worth the effort, prolix without purpose. There was more poetry in his critical rants , really, and he was a good scout for poets far superior to himself. Lately, I had the idea that maybe I would revisit him by picking up the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, the same text I used in college , and see if being forty years older has allowed me to catch up with this man's fabled genius. Two days later, the ground beneath Pound's reputation remains charred and lifeless. This crypto- fascist was as much as a poet as Trump is a brilliant business man. What those two share is one tangible skill, that of self promotion and making millions your greatness is genuine. And both, it seems, harbor an affection for political strong men.

3 HASTY PARAGRAPHS ABOUT THE WIRE AND THE SOPRANOS

Not a slam dunk choice, deciding which was he better crime series, The Wire or The Sopranos. Some hasty reflection and equivocation, of a sort, are called for..Both are crime dramas, but both are entirely different creatures and sensibilities. The Wire was complex and multi-level on the society tiers it included, like a Dickens novel. And the show was contiguous in its complicated story line; it was more in league with the tradition of the police procedural , where the actual police work was always in the forefront. Characters all had their complexities and distinct personalities, of course, which made for compelling dramatic conflict, but no situation in any of the social levels--the street, the cops, the upper class, the press, the politicians--was unrelated to the criminal activity being committed and being investigated.The Wire was a true, crime drama. 

The genius of The Sopranos was that they seemed an inspired parody of the kinds of families you find on the vintage family saga dramas on broadcast tv, but in this case it was crime families instead of oil barons. Toss in the notion that a crime boss has a therapist and we have a show whose creators take license to introduce sudden shifts in moods, style, point of view, ranging from surreal and comic, seen in their frequent use of dream sequences, to comedic, to tragic and genuinely moving, those moments when our sympathies are truly with Tony Soprano. Since the show dealt so amazingly well with the issue of loyalty to family, both real and crime, and adherence to an inverted kind of tradition and notions of the right thing to do, I would also make a tenuous connection to King Lear, with Tony as the addled , ego-driven monarch whose demands for full obedience to his skittishly arrived at decisions creates the seeds of his eventual demise,

As mentioned, the show creators also liked abrupt changes in tone, and were mindful to remind us, just when we begin to feel that Tony or any of his colleagues are redeemable and wholly sympathetic, we witness again that these people are monsters, cruel, venal, and emotionally distanced  from the harm they cause others.For complexity of story line and epic scale of narrative accomplishment, I will take The Wire. The Sopranos, though, has its own kind of genius that no other show has 

Norman Mailer's 'The Deer Park,' Discussed by David Thomson | The New Republic

Norman Mailer's 'The Deer Park,' Discussed by David Thomson | The New Republic:

The authors argues that The Deer Park was one of the best novels ever written about Hollywood. I find it less so, and lesser Mailer at that, written in a period where the divisions of what Mailer wanted to do as fiction writer hadn't yet found a workable style. At times it is succinct to the point of resembling stammering, other times the passages meant to evoke nuance, speculation, self reflection in the poetry of longer sentences are overworked, over rehearsed, bordering on purple prose. And the character names were far too ridiculous for me to not laugh when the psychologies Mailer was trying to reveal and present in conflict demanded monikers that were less distracting. Mailer was still working toward his original style. David Thomason, though, makes an intriguing case for the novel and finds that it resonates into the new century.

2 books I read while an Undergraduate

"Let be be the finale of seem..." Wallace Stevens, The Emporer of Ice Cream".

Wallace Stevens was the quintessential American Modernist, a man whose muse allowed him to consider the perfection of forms and the imperfections they garner as the human mind considers them and attempts to transform them. This is metaphysics with a memory , deconstruction with euphoric recall. There is a subdued music under the lithe lyricism of Steven's tuneful imagery, with varying degrees of joy, melancholy, desire, loss. The world he writes of is here because he was in the world. Heidegger likely would have admired Steven's reconsideration of Ideal and Idyll formations.

Read this in college both as undergraduate and graduate literature student, sociologist Goffman's "frame theory" of how people interact in various situations, people from diverse backgrounds both in public and private spaces, interacted according to what roles they were expected to play. As a curious student interested in digging a few layers deeper into the Southern and Russian novels I was reading, this analysis came in handy as a primary tool to interpret character motivation and how such characters could switch tones, loyalties, moral outlooks in short order. So far as I know, no one else, including faculty, were using Goffman or his dramatically analysis as a means to discern the narrative complexity of particular writers. In any case, I found Goffman's ideas , examples and terse writing style compelling, essential elements to interest a would be know it all.

Michelle Wolfe : This is me not giving a fuck that you don't give a fuck

I took a wait and see stance regarding comedian Michelle Wolfe in the hubbub that followed her controversial at the White House Correspondent's Dinner earlier this year, Suddenly famous, she was thrust into the spotlight for a group of jokes that impaled the reputations of President Trump and those who worked in close quarters with him. I'm hardly a Trump fan, but there was something disconcertingly sub-par about her performance; she seemed as if she'd just walked in from the bar across the street and ad-libbed a series of punchlines she thought of on her cab ride over to that imaginary tavern. Her persona was the quintessence of don't=give-a-fuck, a quality that makes hipster-ism the most repugnant quality of those under twenty-one who have a year or two of college. Maybe I was missing something, I thought. Turns out I was looking for something that wasn't there, the funny. Wolfe's Netflix show "The Break" is a dud. Her sudden fame seems more a case of a person being in exactly the right place at the right moment in history, elevating her to a pay scale far beyond what her actual talents merit. Her anti-trump, anti-racist, anti-misogynist stances don't hide her glaring problem, which is that she's not consistently funny. Little effort seems to have gone into the writing, rehearsing of the material, and that may be the point, to give the thing an air of an undergraduate box theater class project where every idea, actually funny, half-baked and dead on arrival, are tossed into a set up where flubs, awkward pauses, word slurring and cold readings from a teleprompter are supposed to add an edgy element to the proceedings. I am attracted to the idea of an anti-aesthetic, but I suspect even Brecht and Artaud would have Wolfe and her fellow fellows, of the crusted-snot nose variety, go back and learn, finally, that comedy, however pure your politics may seem, is not easy.